Wealday, Pharast 27, 4713 afternoon
The Spirit Forest, House of Withered Blossoms

The day is barely half over and already it feels as if weeks have passed since waking this morning.

Olmas and I crept down the circular stairs, and Dasi and Zos followed after. At the bottom was a small pillared room with a four gibbets hanging from the ceiling. Two of the cages were occupied by a pair of Tien looking humans (at this point in time almost everyone we meet is Tien, and I suppose there is no point in mentioning ethnicity unless someone is not).

They appeared to be unconscious and in rough shape and Huffy was cooing his concern so I channeled to heal them. The woman opened her eyes and said, “I hate it when they do that.” She was startled when she saw Olmas and I, but kept quiet when I motioned for her to hush.

We cautiously moved out into the maze of partitions.

At the same time Radella, Ivan and Kali lifted up one of the grates and dropped down before a metal door, which they opened and continued on into the partition maze.

I drifted up to look over the walls and saw the others as well as a pair of “Morg” skeleton/zombie things. After a brief encounter the creatures were dead and searching the area revealed no additional hazards.

We returned to the captives and set them free. They had been traveling along the forest road some weeks ago when their party had been attacked by the spider kin and dragged back here. They were traveling north to flee the nearly regular raids upon the rural villages in Minkai. This sounded odd, but they thought it normal.

We led them up to the ground level above us, and armed them with some simple weapons that were lying around.

We then descended down the next stairway to a web cluttered hallway that led around a large square room. Four pillars held up the ceiling, but the floor tilted down towards the center where a large dark hole dropped into darkness.

Kali and I drifted nearer to the pit as the others filed in, keeping well back from the center. A quartet of aranea spider beings scuttled out from the webbing and attacked, but they were seriously over matched and soon fell twitching to the floor.

Kali became invisible and flit down the hole to quickly scout around. She returned and reported that the pit dropped down some fourteen fathoms, but after the first three were stone steps circling around to the floor far below. The steps landed in the corner of a vast cavern, at the far end of which stood a mighty wall reaching to within a couple of feet of the ceiling. Hobgoblins could be seen patrolling the top of the wall along the parapet behind battlements.

She paused for a moment before saying a double gate was set in the wall, and a couple of humans had been impaled upon the large spikes protruding from the gate.

Other than a soft angry chittering from Star, all of my friends (even Beorn) were dead silent.

We discussed our options and decided to go for a two prong approach. We would all fly down the pit where Kali would summon a large earth elemental, which would rush through the wall and attempt to unbar the gates. Once the elemental appeared we would all fly toward the wall, and Ivan would use Stone Shape to lower one of the battlements by a couple of feet to provide us with easier egress to the courtyard beyond.

The plan mostly worked — certainly well enough to get us inside, where we made short work of the half a dozen hobgoblin guards within. In the courtyard two large doors were to the north and a smaller door was east.

Radella and I opened the gate and lowered the two men impaled on the spikes. I healed them, and they volunteered some useful information about the fortress.

“Nobody goes through the northern doors. At least we’ve never seen them. The guards on the wall change every twelve hours. They impale prisoners on the gate with less regularity, but more than often enough for us.”

“The single door leads to ”her” domain — I’ve never seen her and from what I’ve heard I don’t want to. She’s truly awful.”

Dasi pressed him for a name, and he finally sputtered out, “Manusikaru.”

The other fellow continued the audio tour. “First there’s a torture chamber, and beyond that is a walkway where stone giants patrol: it is called ”The Balcony of Pillars.” Why? Well because it is a balcony with pillars. Further in you’ll come to ”The Agonies” and the ”Great Ledge”. This is what the hobgoblins call a pit with no bottom. That’s where it is rumored that ”she” dwells. Most of the hobgoblins live around the pit, and they are led by a Budo, a great hobgoblin who rides a great big pig. He calls himself ”Budo the Swine Shogun.””

His friend chimed in, “Yeah, but we prisoners call him something else behind his back that doesn’t sound as nice. Rumor has it riding isn’t all he does with pigs.”

Bless his little heart, but this gave Beorn a bad case of the giggles, which we had to endure for the next hour or so.

We took them up to the ground level where they joined with the other couple to wait for our return, or if things looked desperate, to escape out the front door.

In the meantime our companions had taken various useful items from the corpses of the hobgoblins.

516-519	potions of Cure Serious Wounds
520	4 masterwork amour
521	4 masterwork shields
522	4 masterwork composite longbows Str +3
523	71 arrows (black with red fletching)
524	4 masterwork morning stars

We discovered that each of the two northern doors opened onto a trap room with a dummy door at the far side. Radella disabled the traps, thus making the rooms useable to us.

The small eastern door led to a long narrow room with bodies in various states of decomposition hanging from the walls and a door at the far end. Radella entered and I followed, floating six inches above the floor. It was just as well that I did not walk in, because Radella found several pit traps in the floor.

My interest was taken up by the series of small holes in the wall. I almost thought a felt a breeze coming through one, and had called Radella over to look when we heard a loud shout of “Fire!”

Both of us were peppered with arrows fired through the holes. Radella ran for the door at the far end, which was locked. I drifted to the center of the room and began to emit an aura inspired by Groetus which I find calming but others usually less so.

Olmas used some magic device to blast the door from its hinges and the gang all rushed past me to attack the attackers. Steps led up from the room beyond to a pillared balcony where a pair of stone giants looked over at us and yelled.

I blasted them with a Confusion spell while Kali put up a wall of force at the top of the stairs.

Things weren’t going well for the hidden archers. Sure, a few continued to fire, but some stood and stared, others shot their comrades, while still others poked themselves with their arrows. This plus the onslaught of my companions made quick work of these hobgoblins.

The giants had not fared much better. While one wandered about bashing the invisible wall, the other first injured himself and then took exception to the other giant’s presence (can you blame him — have you ever smelled a giant?) and began to beat on him.

Soon one giant fell, and Kali dropped the wall so the rest of us could finish off the survivor.

And so here we are surrounded by more dead hobgoblins and a pair of dead giants.